


Glissade

by Euregatto



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Bath Sex, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Hand Jobs, Huddling For Warmth, Pillow Talk, Request Fill, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-02-29 02:22:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18769225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euregatto/pseuds/Euregatto
Summary: Proxima was being insightful again, and Corvus turned to her, raised the lantern to see the expression of frustration in her features. “What does it matter?” he asked then, searching her face for an emotion that indicated an answer. “Youjoined to be weaponized, did you not?”“Andyou,” she said pointedly, though it was not anger that reverberated from her throat, “will never speak that way to me again.”The silence fell the way snow did, based on plausibility when the world was glitched into existence by happenstance, a reflection of how the infinity stones brought brilliance and terror with them across the universe. The reality of the cold lingered distantly in the back of his mind: the chance of all of her, and the irrational meaning in it.





	1. Glissade

**Author's Note:**

> Request fill from my inbox: { If you have some time, can I request a Corvus/Proxima fic? I love cuddling-to-stay-warm stories & any route you go with this is fine! Bonus points for some of your delicious smut  
> ( ͡° ͜ ʖ ͡° ) thank you }
> 
> This got...very out of hand. It doesn't really fit anywhere in the canon timeline, but it is after the events of "Black Order #1-5" so insert it wherever you want. A simple matter of indulgence, if you will.
> 
> I hope you enjoy it all the same.

   

 

   

Darkness had swallowed them for hours while they trekked across the tundra, forced to move gradually as snow sucked them down to their knees with each long stride, before an inhuman growl finally erupted behind Corvus Glaive and he pulled to a stop at the roots of the mountainside. He searched his pockets for flint, slotted open the grate of the lantern he had been carrying since they left the village, and lit the wick. Amber-orange light spilled into a cone across the hibernal land. It amplified the crosshatched shadows cast from the branches of departed trees and the thin forest earned a mystical, crepuscular quality, as if it had always been alive in the deep dusk, silently scrutinizing passersby with all its ancient judgment.

Corvus hefted the lantern from the snow and gazed into it. “How primitive,” he said with a wry grin. He imagined for a moment what the Ebony Maw would say, had the latest missions not divided their team across the planet—something about appreciating the fundamental inception of _archaic knowledge,_ or perhaps he would merely complain of the cold.

He noted the figures that breached the vicinity of the light and moved close to it, partly in wonder; Proxima sought its warmth, moved her hand until it hovered just over the tempting threshold of its cylindrical surface and stayed there, an involuntary twitch away from a nasty burn. Brackets of fire were lucky enough to fall across the sharp curve in her jaw. It occurred to him that she looked quite terrible, as exhausted as him, no doubt—the last few days had been restless, scouring the planet for a mystery swallowed by time, driven off pure _speculation_ , as the Maw had claimed it to be. The depressions beneath her eyes were worsened in the dark.

Their hyperborean guide was less than half Corvus’ height, and he was concealed entirely in cloth and padded armor. What parts were visible were thick with muscle and fur that most certainly maintained his heated core, yet he seemed to move close to the lantern on instinct. He spoke in guttural, simmering growls. A clawed hand gestured to the path ahead of them. It swerved downwards from the plateau and into the deep jowls of a ravine, beckoned inwards by sharp cuts of black ice.

“Ominous,” Proxima said. “I have seen light make an easier escape from blackholes.”

“Will you be alright?” Corvus asked, touching her cheek to feel how cold she became despite the hooded shawl the guide had provided for warmth. His species had lived in craggy highlands by volcanic floes, so the frigid air was separated from him by a constant skein of heat she could not produce. He knew she was sensitive to deep throes of cold, even if her tolerance threshold was impressively high, but they were not infallible and the risk of organ failure this far from the outpost was simply too risky. When his palm met her face, she felt almost ghostly. “My love, you’re freezing.”

Proxima gave him a reassuring smile. “I would tell you if it was an issue. Trust in your wife, Corvus.”

He did. The assurance was in her subtle gestures, the way she oh so slightly tilted her head, her eyes lingering on his for a moment longer. “All right,” he said then, facing the guide. “Will you wait for our return?”

The creature, carrying his own lantern on a tall staff, nodded an affirmative. Beneath the cloth that covered his face, his feline eyes glowed aureate, amplified by the manifestation of lights in the gloaming.

Corvus took the lead into the gorge of the valley. They came upon the mountain’s hollow— assessed the jowls of its darkness first with a quiet listen, heard only the groaning of tectonic plates deep below and the air’s momentum of the coming storm. Proxima momentarily lit her spear to reveal a deep pass of ice.

“My brother told me once,” Corvus said, and the thick hiss in his voice reverberated down the heart of the ravine, “that some species, they slide on ice for _fun_. A testament to the adaptability of sentient organisms, it seems, to conquer the harsh weather and make a game of it.”

“Maybe they know something we don’t,” Proxima replied thinly.

Without another word, they descended. The wind, inconsolable on the surface, was absent here and the cold that emanated into the ravine was lifted out by seismic pressure from the foundation. It seemed like this planet was born from ice and would die in ice. At one point, Corvus skid down a slope and braced with one hand, felt the grooves of the ground, how impure the frost was when his glove came away marked by mineral.

“I imagine,” he said to her, because they had been silent for most of the trek and here the quiet didn’t sit right with two people in it, “the Ebony Maw would have left me by now for warmer territories.”

“Can I voice an opinion?”

“Always.”

“I hate that he insists on that name. _The_. Ebony Maw. As if he were some _thing_ to be weaponized.”

Proxima was being insightful again, and Corvus turned to her, raised the lantern to see the expression of frustration in her features. “What does it matter?” he asked then, searching her face for an emotion that indicated an answer. “ _You_ joined to be weaponized, did you not?”

“And _you_ ,” she said pointedly, though it was not anger that reverberated from her throat, “will never speak that way to me again.”

“I apologize, my words did not resonate my meaning.”

The silence fell the way snow did, based on plausibility when the world was glitched into existence by happenstance, a reflection of how the infinity stones brought brilliance and terror with them across the universe. The reality of the cold lingered distantly in the back of his mind: the chance of all of her, and the irrational meaning in it.

“We have had this conversation before.”

“Yes,” he said, “we have. I know. I meant only that—”

“I am fully aware of what you meant.” There was an edge to her tone. Cruel and hard as black ice. She twitched away from his touch when he motioned for her hand, and the weight of the ravine became apparent to him, the deepness of its age, the vastness. Corvus withdrew, hefted up the lantern as he returned his focus to the task ahead of them and continued down the hillock.

Proxima remained by his side, though they lingered in an encompassing silence. She made it clear that conversation would no longer be entertained. Her body language became like that of a spider, holed up deep in a rotted wall, so he respected her space and chose not to acknowledge her presence until she was no longer sneering. But other noises filled the quiet. Sounds of cracking ice ricocheted like gunshots from the enclosed ravine walls. It unsettled him; he wondered if the mountain would converge on the rift, slip from its place in the earth and barrel down upon them.

When the embankment began to plateau, Corvus finally felt it was safe enough to tell her, “It was not my intention to upset you.”

“I know, my love, but we are not _things_ for someone's use. You promised me we would be more than that, yet here we are, and I cannot say _surprise_ is what I feel.”

“Please, Midnight. I do not wish to fight about this.”

She pressed her lips together and looked away from him, into the valley. There was nothing between them but the vast rift that cleaved the mountain through, the utter isolation of it; he shifted, felt ice crack underfoot, heard it rupture the delicate quiet. 

“I promise we will talk this over when we get back,” he said. It was all he had to offer. “I will do whatever makes you happy.”

This time, when he reached for her hand, she met him halfway. She was colder than the snow.

     

   

*

   

    

Then, they found the temple—what was left of it, at least. Corvus hadn’t anticipated discovering it in mint condition, given that this planet’s ancients had built it almost four thousand years ago, but a part of him had expected to find nothing at all. Their guide had been right, too—when Proxima used the light from her spear, the glare reflected off only a thick wall of ice, but in the low flames of the lantern, the entrance had quite impossibly appeared, framed by sagging stone carved out from even older tools.

There was a firepit hollowed out in the center of the chamber. It hadn’t been used in a terribly long time, from what Corvus could tell, but sat as preserved as the rest of the mountain, coated in a fine layer of powder and ground stone. It was filled not only with old, gray wood but with the same mineral from beneath the ice, pressed into fine dust. Corvus took his flint and lit a fire. It ignited the pit instantly, flames tinged silver, and illuminated slick rock, ripping violently through the frost and darkness.

“How deep must we go?” Proxima asked, gazing into the chamber of the temple. The shadows scrambled to get away from the firelight, but even in its intensity the heat couldn’t break the tenebrosity’s will.

Corvus rolled his shoulders. “My only answer is that we will find out after you’ve rested.” She looked at him, furrowed her brow. He gestured to her with his glaive and added, “Do _not_ be stubborn, you’re much too cold to continue this way.”

“Deplorable. Do you know who you sound like?”

“Yabbat?” he figured, although he couldn't say that was an accurate assumption. He often got the feeling that Yabbat found their team's lack of self-preservation hilarious.

“Your _brother_.”

Corvus backed up against a slab of stone and rested on the floor. “Even so, I would like to restore my own strength. Come, put your arms around me.”

She went to him. He half-expected her to sit beside him, but he certainly wasn’t surprised when she perched in his lap, enclosing either side of his hips with her knees, straddled his thighs. She sank into him. Put her arms around his back and held him. She felt colder than she ever had before.

“When this is over,” she uttered into his ear, “I will draw a hot bath, and not even death will be able to convince me to leave it.”

He huffed a laugh into the crevice of her neck. Her hands trembled where she splayed them out on his spine, and they began to work circles into his flesh—he growled, his body ignited with electricity that tumbled down, all primal heat. The nerves were environmental indicators, an evolutionary trait for a species of carnivorous hunters, and to that extent, incredibly sensitive and she—she _knew_ that.

“You’re warm,” she said, as if he hadn’t always been that way, and kissed him. Midnight was deliberate with everything she did, a woman of pure physical presence, and it reflected in the way she worked his mouth open, slid her hands up his chest and then settled for grasping his cheeks to anchor him there. Head pushed back into the stone. Tongues sliding. He always surrendered so easily to her touch. It was the same intense subservience he had displayed with Thanos, but intimate and more complete—it was purely reflexive now, claws hooking into her back, catching on the fabric of her suit, pulling her closer.

He broke their contact to tell her, “You are absolutely insatiable.”

“You speak as if you aren’t,” she shot back, her palm following the contours of his torso to the budding erection between his legs. She laid her hand there, applied the perfect pressure and eased down, the indication of her knowledge—how she’s known, since the first day they met, just how _much_ he can take.

“A fair judgment. Maybe I shouldn’t have married the most beautiful woman in the quadrant.”

She arched an eyebrow. “ _Only_ the quadrant?”

“We have yet to see the whole universe.”

It took her a moment to realize he had told a joke, but she missed the beat. He took her face in one hand, laid his other thumb on the pulse point of her neck where he felt her blood rushing thick and heavy under the surface of her skin. It was a maneuver, one of intent.

“I was trying to be funny,” he muttered thoughtfully. “You will always be enough.”

Her hand was on his belt buckle then. She bunched up his suit, slid her fingers into the gap and found the divot of his hip. He sucked in a sharp breath. Her touch was frigid still, there was no longer a gentleness to it but instead an underlying lethality, as if she could bend her nails and his skin would go with them. She felt his flesh shudder beneath her fingertips even through her gloves, full of warm, rough heat.

She undid his belt, his zipper. He went for her collar, ran his thumb over the notch of her sternum—she grabbed his wrist, not hard, but so definitively that for a moment, he wondered if she was still discomposed by their quarrel. It was unlike her. To deny his touch.

“Did you not want me to take care of you?”

“Of course,” she said, taking him into her hand. She kissed the corner of his mouth. “You will pleasure me in our bedchambers, in the bath and then once more, until I have had my fill—but for now, _this”_ —she stroked upwards, thumbed at the tip of his cock and a thin trail of precum rolled down his shaft—“is what I desire.” She enjoyed making him want her, as if there were ever any doubts.

Corvus exhaled. If he had any rebuttal it was whisked from his mind when she ran the rough pad of her thumb along the underside of his shaft, languidly feeling his vein and how it pulsed. He wanted to tell her she hadn’t removed her gloves. But the friction was nowhere near intense enough—her grip too tender, the texture too rugged, some accidental edge that she found and committed to. She pumped a few times, tested his reactions, fingers gliding over the half-rings of muscle that textured his length. He hissed, braced himself against the rock and grasped her hips, trying to—adhere to her wishes, but she was—

“You’re…”

“Insatiable?” she whispered back, her other hand making quick work of the nerve-points on his spine.

“Far too skilled at this.”

Perhaps it was the power in the truth of it, but the way he said it made her tilt her head and _laugh_. Was it even possible to fall in love with the same person twice? To keep falling in love with them? 

She set a steady pace against him, played with his indicators, made heat pool in the pit of his stomach and he was growling in response to the overwhelming indulgence of it all. In the midst of it he realized she was no longer as brumal as she had been, but he was heating up faster than she was and the coldness about her almost worsened. She kissed his underjaw, felt through his throat how his sounds vibrated from deep in the cavity of his chest and shook violently free from his body—it reminded her of pipes striking and scraping in the belly of their ship. The deep discomfort.

She got him to the edge and kept him there, stilling the motions of her hand on his back, maintaining her pace along his length. There was the sensation of death in him, the tingling through his calves and torso, the almost-falling over the precipice. His visceral noises echoed off the chamber walls. Desperate growls, the midpoint of a warning and a plead. He started thrusting into her hand. Sought his release, sought to claim as much of her as he could before he did. She took his fingers in hers and there was an intimate efficiency to how they laced together. His grip was hard, eyelids slotted to watch her face, indicating his readiness. “Give it to me,” she said, and when he came it was thick and heavy and with an animalistic snarl, claws threatening to tear her suit and pierce her flesh. His thoughts were incoherent before they were nothing, an intense hum that filled him and left him so sharply it could have been a ghost, or something else, entirely unreal.

   

   

*

   

   

There was a second firepit miles under the earth. Somehow, it became warmer here, humid with water that could not freeze but could not melt. It reminded Corvus of his deaths, that sensation which radiated through him again—the brink of unlife, the tethering of one form to another and the constant slipping and falling back and slipping and falling back—and he absently thumbed at his glaive. Proxima retrieved the flint from his pocket and lit the fire. Though the wood was dampened, it still took the flame.

“Our informant is an intelligent man,” she said. The umbra of light filled the chamber. It illuminated the paintings on the wall, the silhouettes of the ancient populace who raised their arms towards a jaggedly cut gem, and older, forgotten characters of text. "I can translate it, but it might take me a while."

“Did you mean it?”

She feigned interest in the wall. “I mean everything I say, my dear.”

“What does it really matter if the Maw, or any one of us, wishes to be a weapon? I understand, we are not things, we are not pawns. We will _never_ be again, but did you mean more by it?”

Proxima ran her fingers over the eroded delineation of chance and desire. The beasts that desperately reached for the stone, begged for its mercy and grace. “I…apologize, my love, for the way I said it. I've been contemplating our situation quite often as of late. This is not your fault.”

“I _am_ at fault.”

“Corvus-”

When she looked at him, she met the warm palm of his hand as he caressed her cheek. “This will not last,” he said, and that was the truest truth he could speak between them. Stronger than love. Than the deep throws of war, pressed back-to-back, the screams of battle and horns in the distance and prayers from the lips of the slaughtered.

The Black Order had had faith in him this far, and that, quite simply, had to have meant something, for he wouldn't let it mean nothing.

   

   


	2. Cascade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Received several requests to continue Glissade or make some sort of sequel to it, so here I am to deliver the goods.

  

  

  

There was a deep ache in his joints by the time their arduous trek brought them back to the ship. Corvus blamed the scaling and sliding through the deep, frigid valley, or perhaps, valleys; he wasn’t quite certain exactly  _how_  far they had gone when his capacity for recollection was in an inevitable, caustic decline from fatigue as it was most days recently. His flesh was mendable but the ice scoured the very energy out of his veins—it left him with the same level of acerbation that reflected in the rest of the Black Order.

As per the plan, they were sitting at a low table in the corner of the docking station when Corvus and Proxima landed in their shuttle. Dwarf grumbled about busting his ass on what had been a thin layer of frost sheeted over solid rock in the south crevasse. Yabbat still wore the threadbare coat the Yuenlin villagers had made for her, which had kept her warm enough to survive the lowland forests. The Maw was leaned on his elbows, face in his hands to cradle the exhaustive headache he’d been nursing since he returned from translating runes in the highlands. It was safe to say, through some calculated refinement of transitive narrations, they wouldn’t be accepting Grandmaster’s missions to anywhere but a beach after this.

Corvus collapsed onto the chair beside Maw. Proxima veered away from the table entirely and wedged herself against the ventilation pipes to collect their heat.

“You,” Maw said, and something about his tone made Corvus feel drained. You,  _you_ —the taste of salt in his mouth, a pinch of it to offset dehydration. “You are quite late. I assume the paintings were found?”

Corvus felt himself throb—he refrained from thinking about how they had been detoured by defiling a once religious temple, and said, “Your assumptions are well-placed.” He leaned forward, bearing the full weight of his weariness upon the table. “I will assume, in return, that the rest of you have succeeded?”

Yabbat rolled her shoulders. “All that’s left is to send our findings the Grandmaster’s way.”

“Which I very much hope is  _not_  a task we’ll attempt today,” Dwarf said thinly, throwing his brother a sideways look.

Corvus nodded. “Of course not. We will rest and revisit this later.”

The others swiftly gathered themselves up and parted. Corvus lingered when Proxima didn’t leave right away. She was eyeing him, her expression conceived by a notion of presupposed understanding that made her look hollowed out and wanting to be filled. There wasn’t a sexual apprehension to it, more so a desire to speak about what was weighted in her mind, but then she told him, “I am going to run us a bath. Do be sure to join me soon.”

“How could I possibly say no?”

She smiled, and she left. Corvus couldn’t shake the feeling that something was Wrong—there was a complete lack of emphasis in her movements, her grasp on her spear was too tight—but still, he followed her into the dark.

   

  

  

* * *

  

  

  

Corvus stepped into their bedchamber minutes behind her, and the door slid shut in his wake. Proxima was already stripped of her suit and armor, allowing them to gather in a pile by the foot of the bed; she had a religious propensity of folding the clothing and polishing the armpieces, a habit learned, and one of few by choice. Yet she abandoned it all there on the cold metal floor. She looked at him, eyes widened, lips parted. Not in shock but in anticipation.

Corvus reached behind him and slammed the lock into place.

She sauntered up, slid a deceptively gentle hand up his chest and to the clasp of his cloak, where she seized the fabric and tugged. “Why, husband,” she said under her breath, “you really should close your jaw, it’s unseemly.”

“You will have to forgive me, my dear. It always feels as if I am looking at you for the first time.”

Her grin widened. She slipped her fingers under the curve of his jaw and felt cool as frost, though she could burn the universe to the ground if she so desired—or he would do it, if she asked. Rip every planet in the galaxy to shreds for her.

Surrendering to his desires, he wrapped her in his cloak, and they kissed.

Their lips never left, even as he undid the clasps of his vambraces, and dropped them somewhere to the floor—even as they stumbled back until her knees hit the bedframe; he pushed her down into the sheets, her legs bent around his waist. Her hands were working their way under his cloak and to the sensors along his spine. He felt himself harden almost out of reflex, the sharp sensation of her nails against his indicators sending intense, little pulses of electricity into every end of his nervous system. Corvus broke the kiss and snarled, the deep rumble of satisfaction that hummed through him. His teeth found the soft junction of her neck; his lips enclosed her skin. He felt her pulse jumping wildly beneath the swath of azure flesh, then the clench of her nerves when he sucked on them—made her groan and fist his cloak to anchor him there.

His mouth roamed down the dip in her chest to the valley of her breasts, sucking her skin from her sternum to her navel. She was already panting above him when his lips closed on her nipple. Her hands went to the back of his head, and she all but purred as he worked; the scent of her arousal intensified, enthralling his instinct to hunt, suffocating him everywhere and everywhere. His thumb fell to the beating pulse along the inside of her thigh, then slid inwards, where he felt her clench and unwind, anticipating his touch.

She suddenly slid her arms between them and pushed up against his chest. All at once he drew back. “My love?” he uttered, breathless. “Did I—?”

“No,” she said. “No, you’re mine tonight, remember?”

He looked down at her, the indigo blush on her cheeks, on her chest. Her hand slipped between their hips then, and—and she was stroking her clit. Dipping her finger lightly inside of her to gather wetness, and then dragging it up and spreading it over her hood.

Corvus grasped the sheet hard enough that he feared he would put holes in it. “Twice now,” he said, “you have denied me my want to satisfy you.”

“I rather enjoy making you squirm.”

A finger slid inside of her. She moaned, arched her back—and Corvus almost lost it. He buried his face in her shoulder and snarled. “My love,  _please_ ,” he hissed out, “let me touch you.”

Proxima pushed herself open with another finger. She mewled, aching with need, torturing him. “Do you know what you do to me?” she whispered, as if it wasn’t pretty damn mutual. “Take care of your wife, Corvus.”

He growled with approval against her neck. His fingers trailed down the centerfold of her body, and then closed over her hand and two digits slid in over hers, curling deeper. She cried out, his palm pushing hers roughly against her clit as he pumped into her, trapping her there. “You should not have teased me,” he said, though he enjoyed the sentiment of it. “I have been thinking about this, since the temple—”

“Only this?” she whispered playfully.

He caught her nipple in his mouth and sucked, earning a deep moan he could feel vibrate the cage of her chest. She clenched tightly around him. He pushed in and out of her against the tightness, forcing her closer to the edge; the only words that left her lips—“Corvus,  _oh_ , my love— _ah_ —"

“That’s it,” he said, and there was a predatory din that rolled out with his voice.

Proxima grasped the sheet with her free hand and ground her hips down, pulling him deeper, and her own fingers forcibly pressed up against a small bundle of nerves that almost made her beg for him. He focused on applying the right amount of pressure appertained to keeping her on edge, a developed skill from their long years of practice and perfection. He imagined this, to her, felt stronger than when she stimulated his indicators. So, because of that or maybe because he was compelled by her noises, he amounted the pressure on her palm, made her rub against her own clit with a potency that could send her over any second but not just yet, not until he wanted to give it to her.

She was deliciously close now, and he was panting with her, his heart ramming wildly about in his chest. “My love,” she uttered, tossing her head back, and he moved faster, forced her closer and closer and—“Corvus,  _oh_ , I’m going to—”

He leaned into her ear and said, “Give it to me.”

She cried out as she came in hard pulses, clamping their fingers tightly inside of her as she rode it wave after wave, hips jerking off the bed, and his name, tumbling from her lips in chants. He held their hands together like this, deep inside her velvet warmth.

For a few minutes afterwards she tumbled down from her high. Corvus finally allowed himself to remove his hand, slowly, felt her twitch and unclench, and slid wet fingers up along her stomach. The orgasm still rocked through her, but her breathing began to stabilize, and he kissed her neck, her cheek, fully captured her lips and she shivered beneath him.

Proxima was flushed from her face to her chest. He admired his handiwork. Ran a claw down the valley of her chest to the divot of her naval, catching little droplets of moisture and raising a trail of bumps in the shadow of his touch. “I’m in love with you,” he said as if he hadn’t a hundred times before, drawing an invisible circle along her stomach to the crest of her womanhood, where he caught the little blue curls.

“And I with you,” she replied in kind, placing a hand on his cheek. “We should do something about our affections for one another. Perhaps get married?”

Corvus snorted. “Ah, imagine the absolute catastrophe. All that  _planning_ —”

“Maw would be quite devastated. We staged a mutiny together; what other bond could possibly exceed that?”

“And our parents would need to be invited,” he said, his tone jumping with the memory of hands on cloth and wood beneath a ceiling in a long-ago place, learning culturally translated techniques he only ever applied when he thought no one else but her was looking, and quite sympathetically. To sew, to grind, to flay—actions not of sustainability but of devotion.

“They would expect children.”

Something sparked through the air. Her eyes turned away from his and to the ceiling, and he propped himself up on one elbow to gaze at the sharp turn of her face. “My Lady Midnight,” he said, “where are you?”

“Elsewhere, I believe.”

“Is that what’s been on your mind?”

They had discussed the topic before—several times in the last few years alone, always entertaining the ideas, the possibilities and by extension the what ifs. The concept of children wasn’t spurred by  _desire_ for them, per say, but Proxima had been the one to help little Gamora with several issues related to female maturity, and that led to Corvus asking, one night,  _Do you want to try?_

“I was simply contemplating the paintings on the walls,” she said, folding her hand over his where it resided on her naval. “The text included blessings for fertility, and I wondered—though, I suppose it does not matter what I  _wonder_ , we already agreed.”

They had, years ago. When Thanos was still alive. When the path forward seemed much less like stumbling through a dense fog.

“That does not mean—”

“Forget it,” she said. “Forget I brought it up.”

Corvus studied her, though her eyes were turned down—the most expressive part of her when they weren’t alone, the subtly in her calligraphic movements, the roll and tuck of her thoughts behind the film of her gaze. If he hadn’t known her any better, he’d miss it and mistake her stoicism for exactly that.

“Do you… _want_ , children?” he asked, becoming violently aware of the closeness between them. The sharp bend of her knee against his thigh, the lifelines in her fingers as she traced the dip in his chest to the vertex of his rib cage, the phantom pressure where their hips almost adjoined.

“It’s not a good time.”

Corvus suspected it wouldn’t be a good time for a long time. Between the Grandmaster and the Black Order, beneath the constant drag and pull of battle. “You have my promise,” he said after a moment, because it was the only thing he could offer, “when things make more sense, we can work it out.”

Her hands slid up to his shoulders, and the smile returned to her face. “Come bathe with me,” she said, as if he hadn’t been thinking of it all day.

And with a grin, Corvus undid the clasp of his cloak.

   

   

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: Proxima gets her bath, and it turns out the temple was important after all.


End file.
